"I am by birth a free Commoner of England, and am thereby intailed or intituled unto an equall priviledge with your selfe, or the greatest men in England, unto the freedome and liberty of the Lawes of England."
William Thompson, 14. of December, 1647

Saturday, 2 October 2010

EU federast par excellence Nose Monkey's post slagging off France for kicking out the Roma comes over all Tony Hancock in 'Twelve Angry Men' ("Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?"). He lauds something I've been known to laud in posts gone by, the Rule of Law:

This is why the English Civil War was fought. It’s why the French Revolution started. It’s why the American Revolution happened. “The rule of law” isn’t just about words written in some dusty textbook – it’s about core, fundamental principles. It always has been. It’s about the rights of man – hence Thomas Paine’s use of that phrase as the title of his most famous work. In another, Common Sense, he likewise noted “in America, the law is King”.

This is a principle that the EU has been trying to bring to Europe, a mere two centuries late.

... Yeah. Nose Monkey, it seems, has a blind spot you could roll a panzer division through, when it comes to his particular favourite leviathan. For him, the antidote to national states doing things he doesn't agree with, is to replace it with a supranational state, even bigger, even more remote, even more corrupt. He sums up with:

Being voted into office doesn’t mean you can do what you like any more than being king means you can do what you like. We’ve progressed beyond that stage. Or, at least, I thought we had.

So close, but yet so far! I agree that demagogues are dangerous to liberty, but for him, progress is not getting rid of the demagogues and letting people be sovereign of their own lives and property, but replacing the demagogues with a commission of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, secret police and washed-up ex-demagogues, driven out of elected office by corruption scandals.